NEWS ANALYSIS

Why Obamacare horror is just beginning

Garth Kant is WND Washington news editor. Previously, he spent five years writing, copy-editing and producing at "CNN Headline News," three years writing, copy-editing and training writers at MSNBC, and also served several local TV newsrooms as producer, executive producer and assistant news director. His most recent book is "Capitol Crime: Washington's cover-up of the Killing of Miriam Carey." He also is the author of the McGraw-Hill textbook, "How to Write Television News."

WASHINGTON — The horror stories about Obamacare get worse daily, but what does it all mean?

Americans are so mesmerized by the daily revelations of abysmal Obamacare failures that few have stopped to wonder what will happen to health care, and the country, in the end.

A WND analysis of what is happening now, and what is likely to happen, indicates that it is a virtual certainty that Obamacare will fail.

What happens after that could be even worse.

First, a look at the ways in which Obamacare appears fatally flawed.

Then a look at what is likely to happen next.

Few are signing up

Democrats claimed Obamacare was designed primarily to provide insurance coverage to the estimated 15 percent of Americans without coverage.

But few uninsured Americans seem interested in Obamacare.

A Gallup poll released Friday showed only 22 percent of uninsured Americans want to sign up for Obamacare.

According to Gallup, “The health exchange websites are not only fraught with the technical problems that have led to so much news coverage in recent weeks, but have also generated relatively little interest or use among uninsured Americans – the primary target group for the exchanges.”

That may be an embarrassment to the administration, but Obamacare faces a much more serious, and potentially fatal, flaw: Not enough people are enrolling to bankroll the system.

Obamacare needs 7 million enrollees by March 1 to be financially viable. That works out to 46,358 enrollees a day.

As National Review’s Mark Steyn put it, “So, on its opening day it fell 46,352 short.”

“Were it to maintain that enrollment rate, Obamacare would reach its target of 7 million enrollees in the year 5209.”

Humor aside, at this rate, Obamacare is headed for financial collapse.

Few reasons to sign up

There is little reason for the administration to hope Obamacare enrollments will increase, even if the website is ever fixed.

“If you are a young healthy [person], which is what the system needs, there’s no logic in joining the exchange and paying what will be essentially twice of what you pay today under actuarial requirements.”

According to Krauthammer, only the sick will enroll in Obamacare and they won’t be enough to pay for it.

That will cause insurance companies to raise premiums, which will further discourage the healthy to enroll.

“You get a system that cannot sustain itself economically,” he said. “And it collapses.”

Key claims not true

The most important claims used to sell Obamacare the American public have turned out not to be true.

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal published the heartbreaking story of a cancer patient who wrote, “I had great cancer doctors and health insurance. My plan was cancelled. Now I worry how long I’ll live.”

‘No death panels’

Physician and former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean admitted Sarah Palin was right – because health care will have to be rationed under Obamcare, “death panels” will have to decide who gets critical care and potentially life-saving treatments.

Individual market disappearing

People who purchase their coverage directly from insurance companies (as opposed to getting health-care coverage through work) are part of the individual market.

About 19 million Americans are in the individual health-insurance market.

Health-policy expert Bob Laszewski has concluded that about 16 million Americans in that market will lose their current plans because they don’t meet the minimum standards of Obamacare.

The Washington Post reports, those who have lost their coverage are now angrily complaining about “sticker shock” when they see what it will cost to replace their health-insurance plans.

Employer-market problems looming

The White House has delayed the implementation of the employer mandate until 2015. That is the requirement that employers with more than 50 employees provide health insurance to their workers or pay steep fines.

But there are already signs the employer market will face the same problems that bedeviled the individual market, particularly the high costs of providing an array of benefits that Obamacare requires policies carry.

Those are the so-called “mandated benefits.” And, as those in the individual market have discovered, those benefits are expensive.

And often unnecessary.

CNBC economist Larry Kudlow wonders, “Why must the government tell me and everyone else what we can and cannot buy?”

He lists mandated benefits that, “as a 60-something, relatively healthy person,” he does not want, such as “lactation and maternity services, abortion services, speech therapy, mammograms, fertility treatments or Viagra.”

But the stark reality that tens of millions may face is not humorous at all.

Most Americans are covered by employer-provided health insurance plans. The White House says 80-percent of Americans are covered by employer plans, Medicare or Medicaid or the Veterans Administration.

Of those people, McCatchy reports, “as many as 41 million people could lose their plans even if they wanted to keep them and would be forced into other plans … based on an analysis of estimates offered by the Department of Health and Human Services in June 2010.”

On Oct. 29, the paper’s editorial was titled, “Americans are losing their coverage by political design.”

The authors claimed, “The law (Obamacare) is systematically dismantling the individual insurance market, as its architects intended from the start.”

The op-ed warned, “Americans should understand that this month’s mass cancellation wave has been the president’s political goal since 2008. Liberals believe they must destroy the market in order to save it.”

“None of this is an accident. It is the deliberate result of the liberal demand that everyone have essentially the same coverage and that government must dictate what that coverage is and how much it costs,” it concluded.

Uncreative destruction

Why destroy the private insurance industry?

To make way for what the architects of Obamacare really want.

Rush Limbaugh accurately predicted all the current turmoil back on Aug. 8, saying “it’s all by design” and cited a very specific reason for it.

“This is all part of the plan,” he explained. “The long-term Obama plan is to eliminate private-sector insurance as a business, because the long-term objective is single-payer, government-run health care. They know that they can’t just wave a magic wand and say, ‘Starting next year, all private sector insurance is dead and have you to go to the government to get your insurance.’ Nobody would put up with that.”

Limbaugh said Obamacare is designed to “make it impossible for people like Blue Cross or Aetna or United or Humana to make a profit” so that Obama and the Democrats can say, “See? You just can’t trust the private sector! See? These people only care about profit.

“So it’s actually quite brilliant. Obama and the Democrats want the government to be the sole place any of us can go for insurance, but they can’t mandate that in a law.”

Limbaugh said that’s because nobody would support it.

So, he maintains, they designed a plan to make it impossible for the private insurance companies to do business and turn a profit, which will allow the administration to claim they “are a bunch of rotten SOBs who would rather pull out than provide you with insurance for health coverage.

“So the government will be there as a savior! The government will be there as a stopgap to save you from the evil clutches of these private sector rich guys.”

‘Forward!’ to the past

Was the administration as clever as Limbaugh describes?

Has it employed a Cloward-Piven strategy to so overload the system it would collapse?

In the end, it likely doesn’t matter, because the solution the Democrats are certain to offer to any looming collapse of Obamacare will be what they wanted all along: universal health care.

That is also known as the “single-payer” system, or socialized medicine.

The “single payer” would be the government. Private insurance companies would be eliminated.

Horowitz believes semantics are clouding a crucial issue: When leftists say they favor “single-payer” health insurance, what they really mean is they favor communism.

And that is what President Obama really wants, he concludes.

‘That’s communism’

“Why are we calling it single-payer? Single-payer means that the government has total control of your health care. That’s communism. That’s what it is. And that’s what they’re definitely driving for,” Horowitz said Wednesday on Fox News while promoting his new book.

“The Black Book of the American Left” describes how Horowitz inherited his radical-left politics from his parents, became a founder of the New Left, but then turned into one of its main antagonists after “three decades of second thoughts” led him to become a conservative.

Horowitz said it’s not difficult to figure out how the push to provide health insurance to all Americans could turn into a communist program.

He said the key players in the drive for Obamacare, the president and his closest advisers, Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod, were all born into households that preached communism, just as he had been.

Horowitz claimed the difference is that he grew out of it, while the others never did.

Health care’s final solution

The author said he knows how they lie to conceal their destructive agenda.

Who, but a communist ideologue, he asked, “would try to centrally plan a health-care system for 300-million people after what happened in the Soviet Union?”

A president who adopted “Forward” as his re-election motto would be almost certain to push for his stated ultimate goal of a single-payer plan, rather than going “backward” to the previous, market-based system.

A ‘transition’ step

In the collage of video clips above, Obama plainly stated before he became president: “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer, universal health care plan … Everyone in, nobody out.”

He admitted the country might not “get there immediately” but that it could “build off” transitional programs.

Canada, he explained, got to single-payer through a “similar transition step.”

He called for a “transitional system building on the existing systems we have” and noted that such “transitions” can be “very difficult and costly.”

Welfare-state Armageddon

Pushing for a single-payer system could be a high-risk gamble.

But as the president’s signature achievement, nearly his entire legacy rests on the success of health-care reform.

Additionally, if Obama does not succeed, it could be a devastating blow to the expansion of the welfare state that has been underway since President Franklin Roosevelt.

Fox News analyst Charles Krauthammer said last week that if Obamacare self-destructs, it could set back American liberalism for at least a decade.

“I would say that what’s really at stake here, is that if this thing really goes south, if Obamacare truly self-destructs. I don’t know that it’s certain, but I would say right now it is more than likely, it would really set back American liberalism for a decade at least,” he said.

Krauthammer described Obamacare as the “completion of the entitlement state” that began with the New Deal and the Great Society.

If Obamacare does not succeed, he said, it would “discredit the entire enterprise of the expansion of government, which is at the heart of ‘Obama-ism.’”

“That’s why I think the liberals are running scared,” he said.

“It’s not just one election, it’s the whole ideology that the government knows best …”